sk

writing

12 April 2024

9:07am Friday

There are a few things that I think about very often: Dan Graham’s memorial service, The Hungarian Pastry Shop, Hua Hsu’s book launch at Pioneer Works, one specific quote I heard in the art room of my high school on the subject of ‘the self’, the kitchen of my childhood home, and my desire to write. (That is a partial list). Maybe I will write about those things here. Maybe I will write about other things. Most of all, I am writing to write.

Not a day goes by in which I do not write – I write for myself, which I realize is a very different experience than writing for others. I consider writing for myself to be an archival practice, driven by a desire to remember. This form of writing that you are currently reading – a form not for myself as the sole audience, not for one specific person to read, and not in an academic context – is new to me. If I conceptualize my personal writing as archival, I envision this ‘blog’ to be conversational.

11:09am

Many sources say "write a blog!". It seems to be a foundational piece of advice given to me at age 23, which, seems to be an age that invites others to advise. On the 12th of February, two months ago, I sat in the staff cafeteria at the museum. An older woman asked to share the table with me. Her eyes were dilated (eye doctor), so I ran one small errand for her (retrieving some mustard and honey mustard). She let me know that she is an editor, and I informed her that I love to write (non public-facing). The key to being a writer is maintaining a blog, it turns out! At least according to her. She keeps an incredibly active blog about Goethe (who I embarrassingly said I did not know, when she spoke his name, when in fact, I just had no idea how 'Goethe' is actually pronounced).

Goethe or no Goethe, the fact of the matter is that having a niche interest makes for an interesting life. Compelled to write on the subject of Goethe, nearly weekly, for sixteen years and counting, she must embody an intimate familiarity with the subject such that thoughts about Goethe are indistinguishable from other passing thoughts. I imagine the blog-keeper views the world oriented through the lens of Goethe, I imagine the inside of her mind to be carpeted and wall-papered in Goethe's words.

My mental decor seems to be mostly composed of nouns: people, places, and things. No one primary academic pursuit fills every cerebral room, however, if I were to reduce my various nouns to one word it would be 'ephemera'. Tangible ephemera, ephemeral feelings, the act of remembering and the language that is in turn constructed in attempt to recreate. I can't seem to stop thinking about it.

'liminal, ephemeral, antipodal' I used to scrawl this small list of three on the last page of my journals. At some point I stopped this practice.

12:28pm

Yesterday, after work, I met with someone on the 5th floor for advice. His suggestion: write a blog. Hmm. There it was again. I left the museum, walked across Central Park, and turned left. The street numbers dropped one by one as I listened to my grandmother in San Diego tell me about an "old lady" she encountered. It made me smile, how, unless you are the oldest person alive, there is always someone who will be older than you. I ducked into the Japanese restaurant, and sat, waiting for E to arrive. We both work at the museum, and this was our first time meeting outside of work (with the exception of his birthday party, where a large crowd gathered in his apartment to sight-read madrigals, except for me, who listened to everyone sight-reading madrigals).

He recounted tales from the world of classical music journalism, tales from his side of the museum, and a rough outline of the past few years of his life, (which was a helpful reference point, considering we had never hung out before). I told him of my eventful start to 2024, and was amused by his response -- with great enthusiasm he urged me to start a blog, with the inaugural post being the story I recounted to him (a love story).

Perhaps two people in one day both suggesting to write a blog was the final nudge necessary to catalyze the existence of this page. Perhaps it was that I've been paying one dollar a month for this domain name for years and it was about time I did something with it. Perhaps most of all, what made me quite fond of the idea of public-writing was that the subject matter that E, a serious classical music critic, was most interested in reading about in blog-form involved matters of the heart. Not academic writing, not literary criticism, but, a tale of a chance encounter that results in love. Everything comes back to love. A Goethe blog is a romance, a classical music blog is amorous.

around 2:40pm

I write with a love of the present moment, for what is to record without the knowledge that one day the words recorded on paper could be read back again? And to know that, on that ambiguous later date, we do not know exactly what feeling those same words will evoke within the reader, even if that reader is the writer themself? Authors, painters, filmmakers, poets, quilters, clothing-makers, anyone who makes anything at all -- anyone who takes a photo, anyone who writes a grocery list, exists in a way that extends beyond themself, beyond their lifetime. For even after death, they can still evoke an affective response. To knit a sweater is to be able to hold someone in perpetuity. The internet feels both mortal and immortal.

If you've made it this far, thanks for reading.

Take care,

SK

12 September 2024

9:12 am Thursday

“The imaginal disk is the part of the caterpillar that remains when everything else turns to mush, when it is in the cocoon, as it becomes the butterfly,” a colleague from a different department tells me, as we sit on the roof of the museum for lunch. I believe she says something about how this disk stores the caterpillar’s memories, to carry these memories to butterfly-hood, or at least this was my interpretation of it as she held up her hands to form a rectangular shape in the negative space while describing the surrounding mush.

Rather than mush, I had previously imagined metamorphosis to more closely resemble the journey from tadpole to frog – a journey in which the creature one day bears enough resemblance to the preceding day, that, when following the chronological thread of consecutive days, it is apparent how it has reached its final amphibious form. The change from tadpole to frog is stark, however incrementally it makes sense. There is not too terribly much that changes at any given time. However, to completely break down into an unrecognizable clay, to be reformed into a new sculpture altogether, feels, well, science fiction.

It feels like science fiction that a crawling insect could possibly become a shapeless formless mush, and re-piece itself together with the ability to fly. It feels like science fiction that a venus flytrap can carnivorously digest — closing like a sea anemone when its mouth senses movement. It feels like science fiction the way that one year to the next can feel so exponentially different.

Rachel and I walk down Driggs, speaking in amazement at how everyone begins life as a child. This type of conversation always makes me think of subway cars – a place where people convene for function, not enjoyment. It is often a place of great impatience, of discomfort, annoyance, and irritability. Within my first few subway rides, after first moving to Brooklyn, I began imagining everyone around me as a baby. If the car was full of children, I am certain more people would converse with those around them. The conversation with Rachel leaves me wondering: Who shares better, children or adults?

As we continue our Driggs walk, Rachel marvels at how her kindergarten students lay on the carpet, more specifically, at how that is not considered out of the ordinary when you are five years old. I don’t recall if I said this aloud or if it was only a passing thought, but it is remarkable that everyone does something for the last time. There will be a final time that a kid will lay on the carpet in a classroom as the thing itself. Sure, there can be recreations of that – say, in high school if there is a carpeted area where kids can relax – however at that point it will be an intentionally curated space for that sort of behavior, that, perhaps brings upon an even greater feeling of comfort due to the child-like aloofness it calls upon. It is no longer the single action of absentmindedly laying on the floor during the school day, it becomes an act layered with memory, changing the expected behavior of a classroom rather than being the expected behavior of a classroom.

I now recall laying on my back on the ground in Gordon’s studio, not long before graduating from undergrad – I believe it was a rectangular carpet that sat upon one section of the concrete floor. If I remember correctly, we were invited to sit, dance, lay, stand, move about this area however we wished – shoeless. How does an intentional space provide different potential than an abundant space? How does an eight foot by five foot (I am guessing on the size) carpet encourage unique movement, while I encounter countless fully-carpeted rooms in a given day that never once bring dance-like motions to mind? (How does one notebook and one pen create more hunger to ‘make’ than I feel when sitting next to a seemingly-endless supply of printer paper and writing supplies?)

Watching Cleo grow up feels both frog-like and butterfly-like. How is he this three-year-old kid? How did this happen? It’s not that I thought he would stay a baby forever, but I can’t wrap my mind around how quickly ages one and two flew by. Surely, week by week I would watch small changes amount to larger ones, yet it feels like just yesterday I was amazed when he said my name for the first time. I feel so lucky to know this kid, and to watch him grow. He remembers all of our little antics, those which began before he could speak. Last October and November were a dream. Halloween, out on the stoop, swinging on the swings in chilly November air, walking to the park making up songs, the coziest Thanksgiving. I couldn’t imagine it ever ending, and it is not that it has ended, it is just that no two seasons of childhood are ever the same. I suppose that makes no two seasons of adulthood ever the same either, if a child is part of your life. I wonder how it feels to be a teacher, there must be so much to learn from witnessing the same life stage repeatedly, a control variable of itself. I imagine those school years to be a form of metamorphosis, though I suppose life involves continuously reentering the chrysalis.

I look up “caterpillar to butterfly” to see if it is true, if the transformation from one to the next is truly that different from that of the tadpole. The diagrams show egg to caterpillar, caterpillar to chrysalis, chrysalis to emerging adult, and then the adult butterfly with outstretched wings. I did not realize that a cocoon is made by a moth, and a chrysalis is made by a butterfly. “Pupa” encompasses the entire in-between stage. I watch a video titled “Monarch Butterfly Metamorphosis time-lapse FYV”. It doesn’t provide any information on if the ‘goop’ state is truly reached, however after scrolling to the comments I am surprised to read that someone, six years ago, wrote “Insects go through the most incredible changes between infancy and adulthood. The pupal stage is particularly amazing. Inside the pupa's shell is goop with DNA. That's it. The larval animal that went into that shell is no more. It dissolved. Essentially, it died. Soon, the goop reorganizes itself into something totally different, and soon after that, the adult insect emerges, looking totally unrecognizable compared to its previous form.”

It does seem that the imaginal disc (disc, not disk) is responsible for storing memory of some form, but rather than memory of any sort of event in the caterpillar’s life, the imaginal disc stores the memory of what it is supposed to do, what it is supposed to become. The disc encompasses various parts of the larva, throughout the length of the body, rather than one solid rectangular mass of information.

On a scientific level, this is all subconscious to the developing insect itself, and the imaginal disc is simply a collection of cells with low potency (very different from the pluripotent cells in the human blastocyst, which could become various different specialized cells in the body, the imaginal disc stores instructions within those parts of the larva of what those exact parts would become when the butterfly emerges), though it feels as if it is fundamental to the human experience. Our earliest memories and ways of being shape what we feel drawn to do, drawn to become. Our earliest selves create an ‘imaginal disc’, whether consciously or subconsciously, pulling us closer to what we wish to become and pushing us further from what we dislike, as we grow into different moments of life.

skanjalikapur@gmail.com